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ABC News: New England Reeling From Flooding

ABC News reported today that the flooding in New England last week stood out in terms of both how severe it was, and how long it has been since the last time the area flooded like this.

ABC News:

Record rainfall %u2014 three months' worth of downpour in less than a week %u2014 has brought parts of New England and Massachusetts' Merrimack River the area's worst levels of flooding in 70 years.

Floods seem to be a major problem for US coastal cities now.

It has always been almost an annual affair in mid-Atlantic communities in north Carolina.

However, it has been a long time since we have seen floods in New Orleans and New England that match what they have been subjected to recently.

In the past year, experts reported that the sole data indicating global warming was not happening - came from one solitary defective satellite. Without the data from that one bird with the glitch, everyone finally agreed global warming and climate change was real. So then the debate moved on to weather it was really a problem.

There have been some really weird floods around the world in the past year. Once subjects get in the news, they tend to get better coverage as they catch the public's attention.

However, a lot of these floods are not in annual flood zones like those along the Mississippi or the Nile.

They are in Saudi Arabia, in central/eastern Europe, and New England. The results are people drowning in flash floods in the dessert, huge amounts of fertile farmland getting submerged underwater, municipal dams being wrecked, and city storm sewers breaking.

Flooding is nothing new. Nor are its consequences: destroyed homes, town evacuations, mudslides, drownings, property damage, and public infrastructure being damaged.

However, over the last year - the places where the floods occurred and the frequency+magnitude seems to be different than usual.

Sure, even variations are nothing new - but ...all of these, all in the same year?

posted by John Collins @ 3:41 PM